> The only winner here is the state, which wastes the money on useless projects and subsidies.

They should use that to reduce other taxes instead. Especially income taxes.

> If you tax people so hard that they lose the drive to work and create

That a bigger problem for income taxes. If the top marginal rate is over 40% people will prefer chilling out instead of working hard for the next promotion.

> more than half of the 400 wealthiest people in Norway have already left the country

Did they take their money too? And their factories and land and patents and other assets? Does it matter that they're not physically present in the country?

> There’s no risk capital left for startups

Was Norway previously known for having a lot of capital for startups? I thought Europe was generally bad for startup funding.

> hiring of junior software developers has basically stopped

You've described the entire world in 2025.

The negative impact of wealth taxes is vastly over-stated.

Obviously the impact depends on the level of taxation, but it is instructive to compare it with inflation. Typical wealth taxes are in the region of 1% per year; a 1% (additional) annual rate of inflation would have the same impact on wealth as the tax and not be considered disastrous for any business except those with very marginal profitability.

Is this meant to say 1,500,000 euros? 150,000 euros is ~$175k USD and the average US home price is currently sitting around $500k for reference.

edit: it does appear that 150,000 is correct, but it is an additional 0.1% tax on wealth above 150,000 euros.

Still basically nothing for the overwhelming majority of people. An additional $1,000 a year for every $1,000,000 you are worth.

Wealth tax on houses (and apartments, cabins etc..) are calculated as 25% of market value up to 10 MNOK and 70% over that. So you'd need to own a rather luxurious house before having to pay a rather modest tax.

Some municipalities also have a separate property tax which iirc is usually an order of magnitude lower than the wealth tax.

Buying a house is actually a simple way to avoid the wealth tax.

If you've owned a house for a decade you typically have like 15 or 20 years left on your mortgage and are in debt. The tax worth of the house is some fraction of the sale price, so for a house that one might sell today for €500k the tax value could be like €50k. At the same time, typical debt after only ten years is probably almost half the house price (assuming you had some savings before buying the house). And with debt, that's what your earnings go to... I as an above-median earning Norwegian with house (and thus very negative worth) will probably have decades before getting anywhere near the threshold. And even then you only pay for what's over the threshold, so if you're At the threshold you pay nothing.

All that matters is the total tax. You calculate the toes tax in Switzerland (including wealth tax) to that of Norway and then you may see it’s a clear choice.

Switzerland's wealth tax is a lot more reasonable though. UK is 2%, Norway is 1.1%, the Swiss ones are all below 1% (depends on your canton), ex the Zug canton is 0.21%.

Yes, there is such a dearth of "eat the rich" voices in the US. There is nowhere to buy cheeseburgers here either.